We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness